'The Killing': Rosie Larson's killer speaks

Mireille Enos, star of "The Killing." (AMC )

2:03 p.m. EST, June 18, 2012|By Patrick Kevin Day

AMC's"The Killing" ended its second season Sunday night by finally revealing the full circumstances of Rosie Larson's murder. For those who don't wish to know, stop reading now. This has been your obligatory spoiler warning.

As in life, the circumstances of her murder were more complicated than anyone could have predicted. In the end it was revealed that Darren Richmond campaign manager Jamie Wright (played by Eric Ladin) was the one to savagely beat Rosie and put her in the trunk of the campaign car. But it was Rosie's Aunt Terry (played by Jamie Anne Allman) who drove the car into the lake, unwittingly killing her own niece.

Ladin called from a family vacation in Mexico to discuss his character's confession (and untimely demise).

When did you find out you were the killer?

I found out with about six weeks left of shooting. [Producer] Veena Sud called me and told me what the situation was so that I could prepare with it and sit on it for a little while. Probably for the last three or four episodes of shooting is when I knew.

How did she break the news to you?

She called me and said, "Listen, the scripts are going to come out, and so you're going to get some information I'm not sure you know about." We talked about it. I think she wanted to be the one to tell me before I read the final few scripts. That way when I read them I was going in with a different feeling. I was excited about the opportunitiy of what I was going to get to do in the finale and the arc I was going to take.

The final revelation casts your previous behavior in a different light. Did you go back and review your actions throughout the series?

I give a lot of credit to the writers. They did a great job of putting things in and adding to the story line and the back story to facilitate me with what I needed. I went back and reviewed things. I think if I’d known at the very beginning, I would have done some things different. That's probably what they were nervous about. They didn't tell me or Jamie Anne Allman for that reason. They didn't want it to influence our performances. I think at the root of it all is my relentlessness to the campaign and my need for admiration from Darren. That was something I'd talked to Veena and the other writers about from the very beginning. I was putting that into the performance whether or not I did [the murder]. Here’s a kid who was very smart. He was abused as a child, I guess you could say. Physically and emotionally from his grandfather. He never got the respect he felt he deserved from him. And he found Darren, this perfect-faced guy who he felt he could manipulate, and he knew he could take him all the way [in politics]. And Darren was always going to be too naïve to pull the right strings and be friends with the right people. But that’s something Jamie was willing to do to garner respect from Darren. He was extremly good at what he did. It was important for him to not lose the campaign. For the same reason Carville blew up. A young James Carville came in and ran a statewide campaign and he was amazing, and the next thing you know he’s running Bill Clinton’s campaign. That’s something I modeled him after.

You watched "The War Room" when you got cast?

I did. I love “The War Room.” It’s a great documentary. I also read a book called “How to Rig an Election,” by a former advisor named Allen Raymond, who shows you the shadows of politics.

Did you have your own suspects?

I did. We went through the season, and we all had a really good time trying to figure out what happened. I had a feeling that I had something to do with it, but I didn’t know exactly where I was going to fall in the grand scheme of things. I never did think it was going to be one person with the smoking gun. Veena wasn’t going to have it be very clean. For the same reason Season 1 ended how it did and caused all the controversy. I felt like it would have been wrapped up in too neat of a bow to have one person be the killer. I think that’s why she did it the way she did. The first act of the finale, when I’m talking to Darren, is the whole theme of the series. Things are messy. Things are not what they seem. For the people who aren’t satisfied with this ending, this is the way crime happens. People die every day in ways that are unexplainable or messy or not just one person with a gun.

How detailed did you get with other cast members? Did you map out the whole conspiracy?

Oh, sure. Billy Campbell and I spent a lot of time hanging out off-set. Kristin as well, who plays Gwen. We would always go out to dinner or if we went snowboarding, especially near the end, we were piecing together everything that had happened over the last two seasons and analyizing every little story point and every little script act, trying to figure out how it could have happened and why it could have happened. It was fun. There was a big box on set for the last four weeks. Everybody on the crew had to put in a ballot on who they thought did it.